Heading to New York

It is the first time in a long time that I don’t take vacation for anything else than open source or exams. I decided to have a laptop-less vacation for the next week to relax, think, and refuel my batteries.

Tomorrow I’m going to New York for the whole week, that would be my first time in the US. My plans are: no plans. My main goal is relax and have fun, and if in the meantime I find interesting places and people, that is a plus. I’m going with Luis which assures me a quite acceptable minimum level of fun.

By the way, if any GNOMErs are around in the Manhattan area and want to hang around with us, please, leave a comment or send me an email to aruiz gnome org, we will be glad to be guided by some local geeks.

Git hall of shame adition

aruiz@dopamine:~/src/gtk-roles-and-siblings$ git commit -a “Added test for hit detection”
fatal: Paths with -a does not make sense.

Funny.

Gtk+ 3.0 Theming API Hackfest: Days 1 and 2

Greetings from the hackfest! Sorry for not sending something before, here are some notes.

Monday

Monday was mostly a discussion day, people presented their ideas and we started to try to reach a common vision to push to.

We also had Michael Ventnor from Mozilla Corporation and Jens Bache-Wiig, from Qt Software, Nokia (he says he’s the GNOME guy within Qt Software 😉 around to give us input from the third party integration point of view.

Jens did a really cool presentation and demo about QGtkStyle, a Qt Style backend that calls to the Gtk+ 2.x theming , really cool stuff, he had a GNOME environment running Qt/KDE apps that we actually had to stare at for a while to figure out if they were Qt apps or their Gtk+ counterpart. Really nice stuff (and really nice guy by the way). This Style is going to be part of the upcoming Qt 4.5 release.

Michael has been actually requesting feedback around how can Mozilla improve integration with Gtk+/GNOME, we talked about some

We did some agreements, first, we are going to move to a completely Cairo based API and CSS format/semantics for the theming and the element matching. Jens actually said that Qt might be interested working together with us to have similar or even a compatible CSS format for upcoming Qt releases so that themers can exchange up to some extend these themes between desktops. Cool stuff!!!

Tuesday

Yesterday was more of a hacking day, Carlos Garnacho started playing around with his new animation framework and GtkStyleContext prototype, an object that would be the responsible to pass all the information needed to the engines for them to draw widgets and its animation states. He actually got some stuff working, check the video:

Robert Staudinger has fixed some stuff in libcroco, the library that would allow us to parse CSS files in the future.

Hagen Shink and myself were working on adding shaped widgets support, so that engines can return a GtkBitmap with a mask that is then used to know where widgets are responding to events or not. This way we could have a rounded button that won’t be clicked if we click on the corners outside of the shape.

Benjamin has been helping the Qt and the Mozilla guys to help to improve performance with the Qt/Mozilla integration. Nice stuff!

I will add some more notes tomorrow or friday. Stay tuned!

Bespin: The Web is the IDE

Just spotted this Mozilla LABS project via planet.mozilla.org, Bespin.

The project aims to create a code editor using web standards that can be accessed from anywhere. Check the video on their web site to see it in action.

This project has nailed an idea that has been in my mind for a while, which is that, for most opensource projects, the web becomes the IDE. We use bugzilla to track our bugs, SVN(or any other [D]VCS) web viewers to track our code and visualize commits. We have build servers that show build and unit test results. It seems to me that the last piece is the code editor.

I would love to see an scenario where we can create a branch, write a patch to fix a bug or add a new feature, and click on “send to build server” and just check the output to see what went wrong. All done from the internet coffee of an airport where you are stuck with no possibility of recharge your laptop battery. This would also save the huge loss of time and productivity while setting up a development environment for the first time or when you screwed your system.

Another interesting feature is the collaborative edition of files. Imaging a patch submiter that has got some things wrong, the maintainer could show him the style fixes and other stuff live!

I think I’m going to follow this project quite closely.

New York, there I go

I just bought tickets to fly to New York in three weeks with Luis. My first time in the US, yay!

This is one of the cool things about living in Dublin, you have cheap flights pretty much everywhere.
If you have any suggestion on what to visit just post a comment.

Aruiz’s GNOME Hacker of the year awards for 2008

Last year I made a post for what I thought it was the list of people that made the most interesting work during 2007. I almost forget to do the same before we are too much into 2009.

Johan Dahlin and Colin Walters

For their work on GObject Introspection. This is the jewel of the crown of the GNOME’s platform future, GObject introspection is already enabling loads of awesome and when finished, it will push our technologies into places that were not possible so far, and of course the life of bindings maintainers is going to be way happier. Johan and Colin have been also started a new generation set of GNOME bindings for Python and Java respectively, PyBank and JGIR.

Alexander Larsson

After writing gio, this guy has been cleaning up the nautilus dependency tree getting it rid of gnome-vfs and libgnome. And after that he started a new Gtk+ branch aimed to get rid of the X subwindows enabling a flicker-free Gtk+ and a lot of posibilities for ARGB visuals and offscreen rendering. Alex seems to have some sort of master plan to clean up the whole GNOME platform. We definitively need more people like him.

Carlos Garnacho

Carlos has been working on introducing Multi Pointer X support to Gtk+ during 2008. Yet another area that will push Gtk+ into the innovation track again he has been also working lately on the new theming API. Carlos is really serious on improving Gtk+.

Tim Janik and the Imendians

During the Gtk+ hackfest in Berlin on March 2008, Tim presented a proposal tailored by him and some other imendians. They had the guts to propose an API/ABI compatibility break and a feasible roadmap to get the to a Gtk+ 3.0 release and bring some hope to the future of the toolkit. After that, loads of people have had the motivation to start trying new things to improve Gtk+ proving that the proposal alone was worth it. Big kudos to him and the Imedio team.

Owen Taylor

Owen has been putting together all the pieces for the new Desktop Shell aimed to make GNOME 3.0 a task oriented desktop. This is something that was long overdue we have been pretty conservative in the latest years regarding the desktop UI paradigm, it’s pretty exciting to see someone actually taking this bullet and trying things out. Great work Owen, and don’t forget to upload more screenshots and videos!

Stormy Peters

Actually I’m not sure whether I should bring this award to Stormy or to the GNOME Foundation board members who decided to hire her. There has been a radical change in the way that the activities of the Foundation has been communicated and also a considerable amount of action items that has been addressed during 2008, quite an achievement given that she’s been around only for 6 months. But most importantly is the way she communicates and how quick she got involved in the community what makes the real difference here. I’m pretty sure she would say she doesn’t deserve it, and that it is the whole community what is great, but I’m still quite happy with the work she have been doing so far thus this award.

And that’s it from my side. If you have a personal award you want to give, make sure you put a comment on this post and a few words on the work that person has been doing to make GNOME rock even more.

Freemix 0.2 is out!

It is not very often to see open source multimedia tools around for narrow niches.

Luis de Bethencourt (from Ubuntu Studio fame) just released the 0.2 version of Freemix, a live video mixing tool for VJs. It basically allows to mix short video clips live, setting the pitch, tempo and that sort of stuff that is quite common to see in DJ/VJ gigs nowadays.

Freemix is powered by Python, Gtk+ and GStreamer. Go and grab it while it’s hot!
If you are interested in contributing, make sure you poke Luis through the launchpad development site, the project needs some love to get to 1.0.

GObject-Introspection and QMetaObject

It seems that the amazing GObject-Introspection work done by Johan Dahlin and Colin Walters (among others) is starting to reach audience outside of the GNOME community.

My good friend Richard Dale, the QtRuby and Qyoto (the Mono bindings for Qt4) guy is putting together some code to be able to generate QMetaObjects, the object responsible to store slot, signals and properties data on a Qt object, out of the metadata stored in the GObject-Introspection repositories. His main goal at the moment seems to be enabling a GIO-KIO bridge.

Quite interesting work, I wonder if some day it could work both ways and we would be able to access Qt classes as GObjects. Exciting, the G-I team is doing an amazing job, keep up the good work guys!

Sneak peek on Hagen’s animation work.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Hagen Schink is coming to the Gtk+ 3.0 Theming API Hackfest.

Hagen is working on an animation framework for Gtk+, today he posted a video demonstrating his work, and the results are impressive:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=793477820753124601&hl=en&fs=true
Google video link

His work is available at bugzilla (#570479). Great job Hagen!

Porting evince

Just found this website via Planet KDE.

It’s basically a reference site created by the Free Software Foundation Europe to point to free and opensource PDF viewers from other websites. Right now Adobe has a quite strong monopoly on PDF viewers.

It would be nice to see Mac and Windows installers for Evince so that we could bring some freedom in a horizontal fashion and those who can’t choose their OS in companies, universities or just lack the knowledge to install an OS in ther machines can take advantage of the code we have created.